Shuttle XPC SZ170R8 V2: Small but Powerful

Compact, efficient and incredibly powerful if you spring for the right parts, the Shuttle XPS SZ170R8 V2 has a lot going for it. The small form factor of the motherboard does not take away from its power. Even better is its capability as a portable machine.

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Since this card is probably the first X700Pro AGP to arrive, we took the
extra effort to take the card apart and a take a closer look at what’s
underneath those large heatsinks.

The first sample that we received came with a fan that did not spin at all. A
closer check with the fan connection revealed that it was actually connected in
a wrong way. Flipping the connections made the fan spin into live again. The
second sample is fine. One recommendation is that Gecube could put a keyed plastic holder, instead of just 2 bare pins,
on the card to prevent this from happening. To those whom are interested, the 2
bare power pins for the fan is located on the top, beside the top right RAM
chip.

The card when it is totally stripped of its heatsink. From the looks of it,
this card is pretty complex.

A picture of the core. Do note that the core, unlike the X700Pro PCI-E cards is no longer
labeled as X700XT. Instead, it’s simply labeled as “X700”.

The RAMs on this card is the 2.0ns GDDR3 from Infineon capable of a
theoretical maximum clock speed of 500MHz (1GHz DDR). This particular card
comes with a total of 128MB of Video RAM.

Like the 6600GT AGP, the X700 Pro AGP comes with a power connector since the
AGP slot on the motherboard doesn’t provide enough power to the graphics card. Gecube uses the 4 pin mini power connector like the Radeon 9700 series instead of the conventional 4 pin power connector found on other graphic cards.

The rear of the card. Unlike NVIDIA solutions, the PCIe to AGP bridge chip is
located behind. This is a better idea since it would mean better cooling
solutions could be implemented to the core. For NVIDIA cards especially, adding
a bigger after market heatsink is near impossible, because the bridge chip needs
a heatsink as it usually gets into the way. ATi’s solution would not face
this problem at least. Well done!

A close up of the Rialto PCIe to AGP bridge. Pretty much unlike the NVIDIA
bridge, Rialto runs so cool that it does not need large heatsinks like what
NVIDIA uses. ATi did a really good job in this field.

The heatsink of the card. Judging from the weight, this heatsink is probably a
copper plated aluminum heatsink. Although the fan was rated at 0.26A (DC12V), it
was surprisingly quiet throughout the test.

The back heat spreader. It seems like GeCube even added thermal pads to cool
the rear of the core. Not too bad.

One of the largest flaw on this card is that the thick layers of thermal pad
between the heatsinks and the components. From the Rialto bridge,

you can actually see 2 pieces of thermal pad stacking on top of
each other. It would be better if GeCube could have specially design the
heatsink to touch the hot surface of the components.